SPLIT ATOM: NEW EGOYAN FILM IS GOOD, NOT GREAT

New York Observer
w-egoyan-film-good-not-great
May 5 2009

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Adoration
Running time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Atom Egoyan
Starring Scott Speedman, Arsinée Khanjian, Devon Bostick, Rachel Blanchard

Atom Egoyan’s Adoration, from his own screenplay, is the 48-year-old,
Cairo-born, Armenian-Canadian writer-director’s 12th feature film
in a 32-year career that has spanned several media and art forms,
and many countries, and for which he has received worldwide honors. I
first became aware of his enormous talent with 1994’s Exotica, and
have been following his work ever since, as well as retroactively in
his past. What is particularly timely about Adoration, and perhaps
ahead of its time, is its concern with the creation of new identities
through technological advances in Internet communication.

Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) is a high-school French teacher who provides
her class with a translation exercise based on a real news story about
a terrorist who plants a bomb in the carry-on luggage of his pregnant
girlfriend. A student named Simon (Devon Bostick) is so profoundly
stirred by the assignment that he re-imagines the news story as his
own family history, with his late father standing in for the terrorist.

Simon had been made an orphan some years before when his father
(Noam Jenkins) crashed the family car, killing both himself and his
wife (Rachel Blanchard). Ever since, the orphaned Simon has lived
with his uncle (Scott Speedman), and been fixated on his suspicion
that the so-called accident was an intentional suicide-murder on his
father’s part.

Mr. Egoyan has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew in fashioning
a narrative in which a series of delusionary scenes are intertwined
with disconnected realities in ever-shifting locations. As the program
notes tell us, "One of the original inspirations for the film came
from a 1986 news story Egoyan had read about a Jordanian man who sent
his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in her
handbag, of which she had no knowledge until security found it."

In tracing the genesis of his film from this news story, Mr. Egoyan
explains: "The story always struck me because it was one of the first
examples of how extreme a terrorist act could be and how one could
turn someone close into an abstraction–not only a fiancée but also
an unborn child. I came across the story again in 2006 and began to
wonder about the child and the legacy of being raised knowing what
your father had done."

The big problem with the film is that Mr. Egoyan’s narrative is
frequently suspended between real incidents and mere speculations
to the point that the viewer may lose track of what has actually
happened, and by, with and to whom. Also, what doesn’t happen is more
sensational than what does. Hence, the trick ending–which I shall,
of course, never reveal even under the threat of torture–fails to
resolve the confusions of the narrative.

This is not to demean the sheer scope and ambitiousness of Mr. Egoyan’s
enterprise, and its educated awareness of global politics, economics
and technological advances in our daily lives. Mr. Egoyan himself is
a man of many cultural identities. His sensitivity to the expressive
potential of his performers is once again reaffirmed in the masterly
portrayals of Ms. Khanjian, Ms. Blanchard, Mr. Bostick, Mr. Speedman
and Mr. Jenkins among many other members of the international cast. As
for Mr. Egoyan, he remains an auteur at the highest level of cinematic
creation, and even one of his lesser films, like Adoration, deserves
to be seen.